


Oh, who adds real titles these days?

by RyanWithSuperPowers



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley and Kids, Crowley being nice to kids, Crowley is a softie for kids, Crowley is good with kids, Crowley is great with kids, Crowley likes kids, Crowley saved those kids fight me, Crowley saves the kids, Not Shippy, adding all the Crowley and kids tags in hopes that whoever wants this fic finds this fic, but can be read as shippy I guess, crowley has a soft spot for kids, crowley loves kids, you can’t kill kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19772065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyanWithSuperPowers/pseuds/RyanWithSuperPowers
Summary: “What’s all this about? Build a boat and fill it with a traveling zoo?”“From what i hear, God’s potentially wiping out the human race. Big storm.”“All of them?”“Just the locals. I don’t believe the Almighty is upset with the Chinese. Or the native Americans. Or the Australians.”“Yes...”“And God’s not actually going to wipe our ALL of the locals. Noah, up there, his family, his sons, their wives, they’re all going to be fine.”“But they’re drowning everybody else? The kids, you can’t kill kids.”





	1. But they’re drowning everybody else?

“I had to, you know I had to, angel, I couldn’t,” Crawly rambled, making a bit too much direct eye contact for Aziraphale’s taste. It almost seemed like he was begging, which was... unsettling, to say the least.

“They’re little, they’re itty bitty, practically babies, some of them are babies! I had to, you can’t, please, you can’t.”

Please.

Please was not a word he had assumed would be in Crawly’s vocabulary, a word that was pitiful in and of itself.

In the future - far, far in the future - one might search online to find the definition of the word please, and one would find that it can mean many things. In this scenario, however, it meant one thing. It meant listen to me, hear my plea, hear what I am asking to you, hear me beg, and please, have mercy.

“You can’t kill kids,” the demon Crawly had said to the angel Aziraphale not so long ago, and he truly meant it. For all that demons are said to be lying, conniving cheats, Crawly is actually very honest the majority of the time.

He was also quite unpredictable, in Aziraphale’s mind, seeing as he could not yet comprehend why Crawly would do such a thing, something so good, so very against the entire nature of demonkind. To anyone else, however, this outcome would have been obvious.

Crawly was stowed away in the belly of Noah’s Ark, in the very bottom bits where they couldn’t fit any animals without worrying that they might break holes in the floor, and he was surrounded by children.

Okay, maybe surrounded wasn’t the right word. He himself currently stood away from the small humans and next to Aziraphale, clutching the angels sleeve in shaky hands. It was ever so obvious that he was afraid.

(Crawly had never been afraid of Aziraphale before. In Aziraphale’s mind, Crawly was bold and loud and confident, Crawly wasn’t afraid of anything.

Crawly had desperate wide, frightened eyes, and was clutching his sleeve while begging him to spare the lives of children.)

If you were to swap the comparison to one of the children, however - perhaps the small sleeping boy with long dark hair reaching down to his shoulders - you could definitely say that that child was surrounded by other children. In fact, that child was buried under other children, to the point where Aziraphale could not even see that particular child in question, he could only see the dozen or so children piled on the top layer of this orphan dogpile.

(Because they were orphans, their parents were swallowed by the great flood and they were sleeping peacefully as stowaways in the bottom of Noah’s Ark.)

“Crawly, what have you done?” Aziraphale couldn’t help but ask, his astonishment clear in his voice.

“I had to, I had to angel, I really had to,” he went on.

“Yes, you’ve said that, but... Crawly, why on- why on earth would you, you-“ Rarely was the angel so lost for words. “Crawly, these are children. Dozens of small, sleeping children, how many of them even are there?”

“Fifty-seven, fifty-seven of them, I swear it. I would’ve taken more, I could have, I really, really should have, but- fifty seven. I can wake them up, we’ll do a head count, please angel,” Crawly breathed out the words like a prayer, which was frankly blasphemous and the thought should not have even gone across Aziraphale’s mind.

“Please, don’t hurt them.”

With that, the angel was lurching back, pulling away from Crawly's iron grip and sending the taller man sprawling forwards before he caught himself against the wall.

“Hurt them?” Aziraphale sputtered indignantly. “You really- you think that I would hurt them?”

“Please angel,” Crawly gasped out, quiet but somehow still echoing in the emptiness of the room and against the walls surrounding them. One, or maybe three, of the children stirred, and both the angel and the demon went still.

“I won’t. I wouldn’t,” Aziraphale insisted with all the confidence and finality that can be put into the voice of a man whispering so as not to wake the baby.

Crawly fell to his knees with a barely audible thump, his face in his hands and a terribly sad smile on his face.

“Yes, no, you wouldn’t, would you? Thank you, just- thank you.”

And there seemed nothing else to say, so Aziraphale nodded and glanced awkwardly around the large empty space filled with children before turning away and miracle-ing himself back to the upper floors with the much older humans who had built the boat Crawly was stowing away in.


	2. You can’t kill kids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Fifty seven, fifty seven of them, I swear it. I would’ve taken more, I could have, I really, really should have, but- fifty seven.“
> 
> Fifty seven condemned children live beneath Noah’s Ark, hiding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: I may have accidentally called him Crowley the entire time... but it should have been Crawly... so I went back and changed it... sorry :(
> 
> Ps. I am working on a chapter three but tomorrow I get to pack for a 9 hour drive to a family reunion,,, I won’t be able to finish it for maybe a week

It was several days later when Aziraphale next visited the lower floor of the Ark. Only he and Crawly could come and go as they pleased, and Crawly would much rather stay with the children than risk being seen on the upper levels, so Aziraphale was the first new person the kids had seen in over a month.

“Tell me about them,” Azriaphale instructed rather than requested, without preamble as he appeared rather suddenly, startling the few children sitting either around Crawly or in the demons lap. 

“F- angel, you can’t scare them like that- say hello Seth, say hi to Aziraphale,” Crawly took the hand of the infant he held in his arms and waved it at Azirapahle, who found himself waving back instinctively despite himself. 

“Hi,” a small girl also greeted, staring at him weirdly, yet luckily she did not seem frightened.

“Thank you Judith, very nice of you. Amos, can you say ‘Aziraphale’?” Crawly turned to the toddler perched in his lap, and the baby in his arms drooled on his shoulder.

“azzphhhhhh,” Amos attempted, more saliva now clinging to Crawly’s clothing after being sprayed at.

“Good job, there you go, points for effort. C’mon, we’re going up.” He slid the toddler to be seated on the floor instead of on his lap, and bounced the baby still in his arms as he stood.

Aziraphale was only a _little_ bit shocked at how nonchalant Crawly was at- well, at parenting, basically. Only a little.

“Sorry, what was that, then?” The demon asked, and Aziraphale racked his brain for any idea of what he’d come down here for in the first place. Oh, right.

“Tell me about them?” He asked this time, lacking the confidence he had had as a person before having his name mispronounced so horribly by a small child.

“Just, like, in general, how are the kids? Or do you mean individually. Because Amos, for one, is struggling just a bit with the concept of mouths, if I’m honest.”

“Both,” said the angel, far too quickly, after giving it less then a millisecond of thought.

“Well, alright then. As a whole, we’re doing alright. The kids get bored easily, and there’s hardly a time when you don’t hear someone crying over their parents, or their friends, or their home. But we’re fine.”

“You have...” Aziraphale hesitated, reluctant to ask his question, but he pushed forwards anyways. “You have enough food for them all? For five months?”

“Four months by now, angel, shouldn’t it be? Yeah, we got plenty of food. Unlimited, one might say, though Adela gets onto me for suggesting such a thing, since miracles aren’t real.” 

Crawly’s face did this odd thing where it created creases around his eyes and the corners of his mouth stretch upwards a bit, not quite a smile. Aziraphale took a moment to realize that he looked fond, this was what fond looked like on Crawly’s face. The angel was mesmerized by this realization for a moment before his mind caught up with the meaning of those words

“You mean she’s not a Jew?” Aziraphale was quite nearly appalled by this revelation, and his shock was shown quite obvious on his face. And then, in a much quieter tone, “You mean to tell me that among these children, not all of them are God’s chosen people?”

“Yep. Little blasphemous thing that she is, love her to bits. Some of ‘em believe in those other religions, but Adela’s a little queen, she is. Says she’s her own god, sins all she wants and forgives herself, brilliant little thing.”

“That’s- you love her?” And suddenly that lovely expression the demon had been wearing was dropped, and his eyes averted from a small girl attempting to do something involving balancing on her head instead of her feet. His posture stiffened as well.

“No.”

“You did, you said-“

“No, I didn’t.”

“That’s- that you love one of them, really, it’s quite ridiculous. After only knowing them a month, and the sheer amount of them, there’s no time for interpersonal connections to take place. Especially with her still grieving.” Aziraphale reasoned, partially with Crawly, but mostly with himself. Even if demons could... love, Crawly could not possibly love this little girl, no matter how sinful and blasphemous she may be.

“How dare you,” Crawly bit out, eyes sharp and no longer nearly as friendly as Aziraphale hadn’t even noticed that they were when he arrived.

“I love  _all_ _of_ _them_ .”

The angel was shocked into silence, just a bit. He wasn’t frightened, oh no, he could never be very afraid of Crawly, of all people. But he was extremely surprised, and going through a realization in his thoughts as Crawly pointed a finger at him accusingly.

“ You , of all people, angel, should be able to tell what love looks like.” And that was true, there was certainly love in the underneath of this boat, but Aziraphale has just assumed it was for siblings and friends, from the children themselves. Reconsidering, a very large portion of it  was from the children themselves, for Crawly. They all had truly bonded.

“My apologies, um,” Aziraphale scanned the room, searching for a new topic of conversation, and froze in place when he looked to his left.

“You have a woman down here!”

“She’s a _child_.”

“She is very obviously pregnant!”

“She’s fourteen! And yes, she’s pregnant, even if she was grown I’d still have kept her.”

The silence between them was... well, silent, but that in itself spoke volumes. Aziraphale’s apology was also silent, if it existed at all. No harm done, really. Just silence, and the children disregarded them and continued to play a billion games at once.

“...well, what is her name, then?”

“This is Dinah, she’s one of the oldest. One of three teenagers, and the only one who’s... expecting.”

“I see. Then- tell me about her? About,” he gestured vaguely to the room at large. “All of them.” Crawly nodded his agreement.

“She’s due in three months, or around then, we’re not quite sure. Her sister - Jemimah’s four, by the way, though we mostly just call her Jem, easier to remember back when they all had to learn the new names and faces - she’s quite excited, picking out baby names and making up games they can play together.”

“And is Dinah?”

“Is she what?”

“Excited?”

“She’s fourteen. She’s not ready to be a mother.” The amount of emotion on display in the demons snake-like eyes was immense, the pity there alone made Aziraphale’s heart ache. “No, I wouldn’t describe her as excited.”

“Well, can’t you just,” the angel held his hand out in front of him and wiggles his fingers, attracting the attention of an older child by accident, and gestured towards the girl in question “the whole issue away?”

“Believe me, I offered. She’s a brave soul, that one. And it’s not as though she’ll really need to be a mother, she’s got me.”

“She has you?”

“Well, it’s not as if I’ve not already got a couple of babies lying around without parents. One more hardly makes much of a difference, does it?”

“You’re raising them?”

“Well, yeah. Who else is gonna do it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I figured you’d just-“ but Crawly interrupted.

“What, pawn them all of on the people upstairs? ‘Right, nice surviving the floods, here’s fifty-seven - or no, it would be fifty-eight - children you left for dead, take care of them, won’t you?’”

“So you raise all of the children yourself, instead?” The idea itself was absurd, it would be a miracle for anyone to have fifty seven children in a lifetime, let alone to raise them all at once.

“If anyone can do it, I can.” Crawly turned to look at the angel, his eyebrows raised in anticipation for the question he knew was coming.

Aziraphale hesitated.

“...you’re sure?” He asked in the quiet sort of voice one does when trying very hard not to be offensive.

“No, course not. I’m never sure if anything, where’s the fun in that?”

“We’ll get by, angel,” Crawly assured him, seeing the doubt and worry on the angels face. “I’ll make sure of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously considering adding a third chapter, I have it started and stuff but I’m worried I might not finish it so,, I dunno, let me know what you guys think.
> 
> For real, leave comments! Let me know what you think! If it’s not something good, I still want to hear it! If someone else has said it before, say it differently! 
> 
> I’m in desperate need of feedback lol I never improve,, my friends just always say “oh yeah good job, it’s good” and nothing else haha


	3. Are you going to say, Ineffable?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’d be funny if we both got it wrong, eh? If I did the good thing and you did the bad one?”
> 
> Crawly smiled and laughed a bit, and Aziraphale did the same as a natural response while he processed the words, and the smile fell from his face quickly.
> 
> “No! It wouldn’t be- funny, at all!”

Forty-nine days remained until the floods would dry up, and Aziraphale had been avoiding Crawly.

It was his job to thwart demons and assist in the Great Plan, and yet there the Angel was, allowing a demon to thwart the Great Plan. Aziraphale was, understandably, upset.

He’d been doing a lot of contemplating, of thinking back to when God had spoken to him outside the Garden. To when Crawly had spoken to him from atop the Garden’s walls. 

(“It’d be funny if we both got it wrong, eh? If I did the good thing and you did the bad one?”

Crawly smiled and laughed a bit, and Aziraphale did the same as a natural response while he processed the words, and the smile fell from his face quickly.

“No! It wouldn’t be-  _funny_ , at all!”)

It seemed to him as if this were a reoccurring theme with the two of them. It was one-thousand years since The Beginning, and he may not have known the demon very well at all, but it seemed that Crawly always made him question - which Aziraphale tried to avoid at all costs.

Was the flood really the right thing? Or was this- could killing off all of the disobedient and disloyal, blasphemous locals, could it be the wrong thing? Was saving those children from their watery graves in any way bad?

Privately, Aziraphale didn’t really think human children were good or bad, but that they would become one or the other eventually. So, logically, if the children grew up to be good, no harm would have been done. However, if the children grew up to be bad, the world would be just as corrupt as it had been before all of those people had died. 

Aziraphale spent several weeks in contemplation of these things before making up his mind. If Crawly raised the children, he would raise them to be bad. Some of them were old enough to be God-fearing, so Aziraphale could justify sparing their lives as a defensive measure against inbreeding, if there came a need for him to explain himself before Heaven. The others, however, would need to be taken care of. 

So the principality Aziraphale gathered his courage and miracled himself into the lower level of the boat to do some smiting. 

(He wasn’t quite sure how smiting worked, really, he’d not much experience with... killing. The concept troubled him, but this was what needed to be done. He could figure it out along the way.)

“ZZZZ!” Cried out the small boy who had been introduced to him as Amos, reaching his arms out towards the angel who had appeared close to him. The girl holding him looked up at Aziraphale, startled, then quickly averted her eyes.

“Um, hello,” he greeted tentatively, unsure of himself. Amos was... very small. Maybe two years, at best. Certainly not... God-fearing. 

“Ah, Aziraphale!” Crawly was holding a baby, because of course he was holding a baby, he always seemed to be holding one baby or another every time Aziraphale came down to check up on him.

Or not on him. On the children. To make sure he wasn’t corrupting them to the other side, or planning to set the elephants on a stampede through the Ark. Yes.

Before the angel could greet him back in response, the demon walked quickly around dozens of children sitting on the floor - most of them holding or supporting other children, there were actually a lot of infants and toddlers - and the aforementioned child Crawly was holding was thrust towards Aziraphale, still in the demons arms. The angel stared at the infant in confusion before turning his eyes to the man in front of him. He hoped that his expression conveyed the pure bewilderment he felt in that moment.

“Dinae,” Crawly offered, as if that one word were an explanation.

“Uh, sorry, what?”

“Her name, it’s Dinae. Dinah’s girl, she was born a couple days ago.”

“She what?” The angel exclaimed. “She’s not even due yet!”

“The baby came early, obviously. Are you going to hold her or not?” Crawly was, in fact, still holding out the child to him. Reluctantly, he did take hold on her.

“No, nonono, not like that,” Crawly hadn’t let go of Dinae when Aziraphale tried his very best to hold her, instead pushing aside the angels hands and moving them into an odd cradling position, and moving to stand behind Aziraphale as he leaned over his shoulder to arrange the baby in his arms. It was an unnatural angle for Azirphale’s shoulder, cramping it a bit with how stiff his body was, but the muscles relaxed as Crawly rested his hand on the shoulder he wasn’t currently leaning over.

“You’ve got to support her head, see, and- no, just put your hand here-“

This was not the first child Azirphale had held - he was an angel, after all, and occasionally people did ask for blessings on their children. He couldn’t in good conscious turn them away, now could he - though it was apparently his first time holding a child correctly. That was a bit embarrassing, that no one had corrected him before. Now Azirphale was fearing that he might have damaged an infant by not supporting the head well enough; these were not things he was used to worrying about. 

Aziraphale did know that babies liked to be rocked, and that it often quieted their cries. Dinae wasn’t crying at the moment, but Crawly was no longer directing his hands and was just hovering from behind, leaning most of his weight on the angels shoulder, so Aziraphale began to rock her out of lack of other ideas.

“Join us for lunch today?” Crawly asked, though it sounded less like a question and more like a suggestion. And, if he were to be honest, a temptation, though Aziraphale denied that in his head in order to defend his want to agree.

“Alright,” was what he finally answered with, fighting the urge to turn his head the slightest bit and look at the demon on his shoulder.

———————

“I see she’s managed to win you over,” Crawly, for once, was not holding a child, though most of the children were currently sleeping, and those who weren’t were pretending to be sleeping so that they could eventually fall asleep. Dinae has been the only one awake, and screaming her head off at that, but now she too was restful and quiet in Aziraphale’s arms as he rocked her.

“Ridiculous. Clearly, I have managed to win her over.”

“Now you’ve just got to win over her mother.” 

Aziraphale held back his reaction, on some instinct that he likely shouldn’t have had, in order to not startle the baby awake. He very nearly did fall off his seat, though. 

Her mother? Surely Crawly wasn’t referring to himself (or herself, if that was what the demon preferred to be called - Aziraphale had never actually asked. He would have to get around to that, eventually, though he had just assumed that since Crawly took the form of a man, he would want to be called as one. Wouldn’t Crawly just change form to a woman in order to make things more clear?) as the child’s mother, hadn’t he heard some of the other children referring to him by his name?

“Her mother?” If Azirphale’s voice was a little hoarse, it was absolutely nothing to do with his confusion over the current conversation. None at all.

“I wouldn’t say Dinah doesn’t like you, but I definitely wouldn’t say she likes you. The girl remains a neutral party, how about that?”

Oh. Dinah. Yes, of course. Why would Azirphale need to win over Crawly? That was absurd. 

“Yes. Her mother. Quite right.”

“Alright, angel?” Those eyes were incredibly expressive, which was quite a bother when Aziraphale did not necessarily want to see concern written all over Crawly’s face. (Many millennia in the future, Aziraphale would wish that the rest of his face showed more emotion, because he was much more difficult to read with those ridiculous glasses covering his eyes.)

“I’m fine.” There was no reason for the angel to be so tense suddenly, but nevertheless he was. He stood, rather abruptly, and handed Dinae back over to Crawly. “Perfectly fine, though I really ought to be going now. I hardly meant to stay for lunch, and it’s already into the night.”

“Got plenty of things to do up above?” Crawly asked, clearly in jest, but Aziraphale had trouble identifying if he was teasing or ridiculing him.

“Yes, many things to do.”

“Be honest angel,” Crawly said as he shifted the child in his arms to lean on his left shoulder and free up his right arm, “What do they even have you down here for? Your only real instructions are to thwart me.”

“Well, obviously I’m not thwarting anything right now, so very clearly head office has given me other assignments,” Aziraphale rambled, though he was unsure why he was hiding the fact that he had not heard from heaven in several years, much less been given an assignment. He was usually given a list somewhere around once every decade or so.

“Yes, speaking of, why didn’t you?” The sarcastic look was gone from Crawly’s face, leaving his expression quite blank, if not a bit confused.

“Hmm?” The change in tone threw the angel off, and now they were both confused, which was not very constructive to the conversation.

“Thwart me. Ruin my evil plan, send the children back out into the flood, sacrifice them to God’s Great Ineffable Plan. Why didn’t you?”

“Crawly! I would never!” Aziraphale knew perfectly well that he had no right to be offended by such accusations, in fact, he ought to be more offended by accusations that he wouldn’t be against Crawly at every turn. But still, there the angel was, offended.

“But you would! You were perfectly content to let them all die before I hid them away. What changed? Why, angel?” This has clearly been on the demons mind for some time, possibly since he first broke down when Aziraphale discovered what he had done. It must have been weighing heavily on him, the angel thought to himself.

“Well, I suppose...” He hesitated. It had been quite a few hundred years, but they didn’t actually know each other that well. Was it appropriate to tell the truth? “I’ve never seen you care so much, really.”

“Really?” Very obviously, this was not the answer Crawly was expecting. He didn’t know what he had been expecting really.

“I’ve never seen anyone care so much, if I’m being honest. Certainly not any demons, but the other angels... they seem indifferent about humanity at best. You care about them, you... you love these children.”

“Angel...”

“So, I will be indifferent as well, it’s no different from what anyone else is doing, and if no other angels are coming down to smite you and these children for disobeying Gods will, then I will follow their lead.” Aziraphale was quite proud of this excuse, he had just come up with it on the spot. Improvising was not his specialty, to say the least, so he really did have reason to be proud.

“Well. Perhaps it’s best if you are off, then,” Crawly finally said after a moment of awkward silence. “Since you’ve got your heavenly duties to attend to, and I’ve got  _little spies_ !” His sudden harshness at the end of that sentence triggered several gasps and giggles from children who should have been asleep hours ago.

“Yes, I should go. I will see you... sometime, then. To check up that, er,”

“That I’m not training the kids to be evil satan worshippers, yes. Probably ought to come visit again sooner, the younger they are, the more impressionable, you know.”

“Yes, and I might join you for lunch again.”

“Everyone knows lunchtime is the ideal time of day for demonic... things. Goodbye, angel.”

“Goodbye, Crawly.” After hesitating for a second or two, he added, “Goodbye, spies!”

“Bye!” Whisper-shouts back one of the braver ones, while the others all shush her. Aziraphale did not believe he had met her yet.

And so the angel miracled himself to the upper floors of the boat, where all of the humans and most of the animals were sound asleep. He sat near the side of the boat and stared off into the waves below, waiting for morning to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no excuse for how long this took to write :/ sorry.
> 
> Let me know what you think!


End file.
